In just three seasons and 28 episodes, "The Leftovers" has taken a place among the great series ever created. Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta discuss grief and the unknown, and how they translated a fringe HBO series about what's left behind after The Rapture into...

Our buddy Josh Larsen has a new book entitled "Movies Are Prayers," and it's the jumping-off point for a fun conversation about films that give us "religious experiences." Whether that means a connected feeling to God (if that's something you believe in) or simply...

"Then We Came To The End" is one of the greatest and funniest novels about having your soul crushed at work that's ever been written. Joshua Ferris came by his knowledge of office life legitimately: though he always wanted to be a fiction writer, he spent time in an ad agency, understanding how tough it is to give away your creativity to a big company. Now it's ten years later, and Josh has written two more novels and a short story collection called "The Dinner Party." Thank heavens he got out.

Carl Newman is the beating heart of the New Pornographers, and the New Pornographers are amazing. They've been around since 2000's "Mass Romantic," and seven great records later, they're still going strong. We talk with Carl about how the music industry...

You know Matt Ross as eccentric billionaire Gavin Belson from "Silicon Valley" and Alby Grant from "Big Love" and many other roles. Now Matt is an acclaimed writer/director, having helmed 2016's excellent "Captain Fantastic," for which lead actor Viggo Mortensen was...

J.D. Dillard was a Star Wars kid way after the original movies came out, partly because his dad was a Navy pilot and partly because Star Wars was too cool to resist. Now he's directed a sci-fi/superhero mashup movie called "Sleight," and he tells us what it's like to grow up as a black nerd, what it's like to call J.J. Abrams....

Charles Bock is a great crafter of sentences and his two novels, "Beautiful Children" and "Alice & Oliver," use his control of language to evoke the kind of compassion and empathy we need more of in our lives. This interview is about dealing with illness and loss, growing up in Las Vegas, finding strength in...

Victor LaValle is yet another writer who went to Cornell, continuing the "Cornell Mafia" theme of our show. Victor also happens to be a fascinating guy with a great personal story, and his fiction skirts the line between "literature" and "genre" in a way that makes...

Adam Reed is kind of a genius. Just don't tell him that. We talk with the creator and primary writer of "Archer" about his television-saturated childhood, his shiftless young adulthood, his accidental stardom, and why assholes...

Noah Hawley makes "Fargo" for FX, which a lot of people know about. Fewer people know that Hawley also is the man behind the wild, experimental, quasi-superhero show "Legion," which is about to wrap up its first season. Alex McLevy from the AV Club joins today to make the case that "Legion" is...

Steve Conrad has been in the screenplay business for as long as he's been an adult, but with "Patriot" he finally got to see a project all the way from conception to execution, and the results are wild and incredible. Season 1 is full of belly laughs -- it features a folk-singing spy who...

Porochista Khakpour is an artist, a journalist, an Iranian-American and an academic, and that makes her story as relevant and resonant today as it's ever been. She talks about leaving Tehran at age three, her extreme Type-A childhood reaction to...

You love countdown shows! And we love doing 'em every so often, too! Today, our buddy Todd VanDerWerff from Vox.com rejoins us, and we count down our favorite TV shows that have aired in the 2010s. Where will your favorites finish? Prepare to be amazed and outraged!

"O.J. Made In America" is a heavy favorite to win the Best Documentary Feature at the 2017 Oscars. Producer Caroline Waterlow describes her journey to this lofty point, including a love of research and doing the hard jobs that others...

The hardest thing to do in TV is master tone. We've all seen so many shows! We aren't exactly aware the moment a show's tone has failed us, but we do get a sense that things have gotten "less believable," or that the show is "all over the place," or that it...

Grammy-winner John Congleton is one of the most sought-after record producers in indie music today, both because he's insanely talented and because he hates being bored. In his own uncompromising career as a rock musician, John pushes buttons and boundaries with a wild mix of rock, jazz, and noise, and his production career conveys...

After 20 years of trying, Michael O'Shea finally is an overnight success: his micro-budget indie horror teen drama, "The Transfiguration," unexpectedly found its way into the Cannes Film Festival. It's Mike's first feature after decades of writing and working countless side jobs, and there's no question...

John Munson is in Semisonic, and yes, you do know that one song they had. Yet his music career has spanned many more bands and eras, and he's become one of Minneapolis's most-connected and best-liked musicians. Hearing him spin yarns is a blast, as is his perspective on where the recording...

Eli Horowitz is more than a writer who distributes his stories in non-traditional packages. Mostly: he's an entertainer seeking to land the occasional philosophical haymaker simply by writing himself out of the wild parameters he sets for himself. Along with Micah Bloomberg, he's also one-half of the team who created the smash podcast "Homecoming," and you'll love listening to him...

As a novelist, Matt Ruff skirts the fine line between literary and genre fiction, and his books are always surprising. He's inventive, he's funny, and he's highly moral as a writer: even in his wild, fantastic scenarios, conflicts come down to good/evil schisms that Matt excavates even as he's making you laugh. Where does this exploration of ethics...

Micah Bloomberg was not always a writer, but he spent years not showing the results of his labors to anyone, and instead made a living doing sound production. When he finally made a bet on himself, his screenwriting career took off, and now he's at the epicenter of a popular serialized podcast called "Homecoming" starring...

It's impossible to list the best songs from an entire year. But that doesn't stop us from trying! Bill Childs joins as our guest this week, and talks about a new David Bowie tribute album he just co-produced called "Let All The Children Boogie" benefiting the It Gets Better Project. And then we get down to it: what are Bill's favorite...

Quiet Company is our podcast's house band: theirs is the music you hear throughout all our shows. We thought it was about time you hear the story behind the band, so we invited Taylor and Tommy aboard. They're living through the consolidation of the music industry -- where having a ton of fans doesn't necessarily...

"Atlanta,"Donald Glover's show on FX, snuck up on us. Instead of a one-note, grim'n'gritty look at the world of an up-and-coming rapper, "Atlanta" turned out be an ambitious, weird, complex, funny, strange show more interested in the idiosyncrasies of its characters than...

You've heard Chris mention "Clouds Of Sils Maria" a few times as one of his favorite films in recent years, and maybe you've thought, "Oh, he's just saying that to sound smart." Today's episode should convince you otherwise! This is a great film, and we brought in film critic and professor Christopher Llewellyn Reed to talk about...

Open Mike Eagle is a rapper whose music spans genres and reveals more about himself than almost any musician we know. Generally on the Juggernaut, we talk about art that is fully itself, and that's Open Mike: nothing is a pose, he's painfully self aware, and he's...

How does the cultural sausage get made? Eric Garcia knows. Eric is a successful novelist who's pivoted to movies and TV and has been involved in the adaptation of four of his novels. The results have sometimes been terrific and sometimes been frustrating. In this episode, Eric discusses what it's like to...

Chris Harris's new novel, "War On Sound," is out, and we thought it would be fun to turn the tables have have *him* for an interview subject. So Chris Walsh joins as temporary host and asks Chris about the new book, his writing in general, and the sources of...

Today Cousin Josh Fischberg joins the Juggernaut and we count down our top 10 favorite movies of the 2010s. How much P.T. Anderson and Coen Brothers made the list? Our goal for this show is to share films that mean a lot to us, that have taught us something about...

Tom Scott was discovered early in his acting career and cast as the drummer in Tom Hanks's directorial debut, "That Thing You Do." That was 20 years ago, and Tom has been a working actor since. But why? Why is he...

The Lobster is a perfect example of the kind of film we'd like to champion: it's unexpected and dystopic and strange, and so it bears the veneer of an "artsy-fartsy" film that's not for everyone. But that's hogwash! If *only* more movies had such a strong and complex point of view about...

Michael Azerrad is one of the great rock journalists of the past 25 years. He wrote dozens of cover stories for Rolling Stone, he's written for SPIN, for the New York Times, and for lots of other esteemed institutions. He also wrote two of the great rock books ever written...

"'Watchmen' changed everything." This isn't exactly a revolutionary statement: people have been opining about the significance of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's dystopic superhero graphic novel for 30 years. But the story of Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias didn't just help launch the "grim-'n-gritty" take on the superhero genre we're still experiencing today. It also helped...

Mr. Robot is the kind of rightly acclaimed television we should be watching. It's a meditation on identity, alienation and storytelling dressed up as a thriller about hackers attacking capitalism. It's smart and beautiful and idiosyncratic in a way that...

Jim Byrkit put in the hard work of building a Hollywood career from the ground up: he was a commercial storyboard artist for years, a gig he eventually parlayed into a friendship with Gore Verblinski and a major role in...

Chris Collingwood was the frontman for one of the great power-pop bands in history, Fountains of Wayne. Of course, even *he* doesn't really know what "power pop" even means, other than being kind of a dismissive description. Now Chris has broken away and taken his music in a new direction...

Garrett Lerner is an honest-to-goodness working TV writer who's worked on one bonafide monster hit -- HOUSE -- and wrote several of that excellent series' most compelling and emotional episodes. Yet Garrett doesn't think...

Adam Kempenaar is even-keeled and professional in a culture that often rewards snark, and he's made Filmspotting -- which he's hosted for 11 years -- one of the best and most popular movie podcasts in the world....

Saul Bellow was one of the lions of American literature in the 20th century, and Chris Walsh served as his student, friend, mentee and amanuensis for several years late in Bellow's life. What was it like to...

The Coens have made some of the most iconic and idiosyncratic films in the history of the medium. You’ve probably seen at least a few of their films, or probably have at least *heard* of them. On today’s show...

D.T. Max is a New Yorker staff writer who wrote the first biography of Wallace and has become a great, low-key advocate for DFW's work. D.T. developed a picture of a writer who tried really hard, who had his genius and his flaws...

Vox.com’s culture editor Todd VanDerWerff has written that the best show on TV is “The Americans.” But why? What is FX’s little-seen, low-key espionage drama doing that hasn’t been done before, and why does it appeal...

Marty Beller is the amazing drummer for They Might Be Giants. Shouldn’t that be enough? Well, it’s not: Marty also composes film and TV scores, and is currently music director for a terrific play called “The Total Bent.” The fact that...

Steve Almond is a writer, a thinker and a self-professed curmudgeon, and he's spent much of his professional life trying to cut through bullshit. From his upbringing by parents who partook in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam movements, to a journalistic and fiction-writing career, to his recent book exploring the conflicted plight of the NFL fan, Steve has a history of brilliant gallows humor and avoiding easy answers.

Professionally speaking, first and foremost Josh Larsen is a film critic, one half of a successful duo on the Filmspotting podcast. But he's also a man of faith. We talk about the intersection of movies and Christianity, and how that influences Josh's criticism. And then we tackle a fun task: recommending underappreciated films since 2000.

What do you do when you achieve your rock-star dreams, and then discover they're killing you? You may know Ross Flournoy as the frontman of Apex Manor, whose song introduces every episode of our sister podcast. His story is one of frustration and perseverance, from his time in the late, lamented Broken West, to his changeover to a more hard-driving style in Apex Manor, to battles with addiction, and finding a way to survive in today's music industry.